Embed documents from Scribd

The overhauled Scribd (as GigaOM puts it) is something close to YouTube for documents. It's really easy to embed a document in your pages using Scribd.

Take a look at how the following document looks like embedded in a page:


Similar to YouTube, Scribd uses flash as base technology for rendering documents. Here's how the embedded code looks like:

<object width="500" height="200"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="SameDomain" /><param name="movie" value="http://static.scribd.com/FlashPaperS3.swf?guid=g1t9xgitr71v6&document_id=28185&page=1" /><embed width="500" height="200" src="http://static.scribd.com/FlashPaperS3.swf?guid=g1t9xgitr71v6&document_id=28185&page=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed> </object>

Getting the code is again as simple as YouTube:

Track statistics for your website using SiteMeter

Sitemeter is a fair web analytics tool. Not as cool as Google Analytics, but it does provide things like public statistics where users can see the number of visitors for your website. They actually started as a web counter, migrating towards a web analytics tool afterwards.

If you wish to track number of visitors for your website and make it public, as well as use other services of SiteMeter (keep in mind this is not a review of SiteMeter), here's what you have to do.

First, create an account. Second, customize your SiteMeter tracker. You can choose between 6 types of logos. And finally, copy the Javascript code they provide and paste it in your website. They provide a nice set of instructions on how to paste their Javascript code in various public blogging platforms or web hosting services.



You can check how SiteMeter logo looks on this page by scrolling down.

Embed Recent Readers widget from MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog provides some nice services for bloggers, like the list of recent readers you often see in some sites. I'm not particularly a big fan of MyBlogLog especially due to the design of their website, but for those who wish to join this community, here's how you can do it:

First of all, you need to have an account on MyBlogLog. After creating an account, go to My Home page inside your account and look for a button called Get widgets (which is actually only one widget right now).



In the next step you can customize (to some degree) your Recent Readers widget. When I say "to some degree" I mean you can choose colors only from a palette. There's no free text color entry (I needed a special color for integrating the widget inside this website).

Next, you have to copy the tracking script from the bottom of the page inside your HTML template for your blog.

And finally, you can take the code for the widget and again put it somewhere inside your HTML template. Here's how the code looks like:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pub.mybloglog.com/stats.php?mblID=2007040200395835&width=180&max_chars=20"></script>

Check out how it looks by scrolling down this page and look for the widget in the right part.

That's it!

Embed Amazon wishlist widget on your site

The guys at ProgrammableWeb mention the Amazon wishlist widget. If you wish to personalize your page and add your book preferences, this one may help you.

Although the original page gives you the option of embedding the widget only in Google pages, you can extract the script and embed it in sites other than Google.

Here's how the embedded widget looks like:



And here's the source code:

<script src="http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.mashupslive.com/wishlist_gadget/wishlist_gadget.xml&up_state=&up_wishlist=BUWBWH9K2H77&up_alow_search=1&synd=open&w=320&h=340&title=Amazon+Wishlist+Gadget&nocache=1&border=%23ffffff%7C0px%2C1px+solid+%2382CAFA%7C0px%2C2px+solid+%23BDEDFF%7C0px%2C3px+solid+%23E0FFFF&output=js"></script>

Embed google spreadsheets in your website

Google Docs and Spreadsheets provides a lot of sharing options for your spreadsheets. In this page, they explain how you can embed your spreadsheet inside your website.

Here's how a sample spreadsheet looks like:


And here's the generated code:

<iframe width='500' height='' frameborder='0'src='http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pPwo7--7PfjIRdqjkoYfiIQ&output=html&widget=true'></iframe>

They also provide a lot of different other options for embedding:

Embed videos from Godtube, the christian video sharing website

Techcrunch blogs about GodTube, a video sharing website for christians. As any serious video sharing website, you can embed videos from GodTube:

Embedding slideshows created with Picasa Web Album

Picasa is a great tool allowing you amongst others, integration of slideshow previews. Unfortunately, they don't provide also a single piece of HTML code that you could easily copy and embed it in your site.

What you can do after creating your album, is to embed the link to the page that displays the slideshow in an iframe, as presented below:

Here's how the embedded slideshow looks like:



To get the link, simply right on the Slideshow button in Picasa and press Copy link location (in Firefox).



Here's the HTML code for the embedded slideshow:

<iframe style="float:right;" height="500" width="250" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/hanganum/MarcelChirnoagaApocalypse/photo#s5049117095323324690"></iframe>

There are a lot of limitations to this slideshow. There's nothing you can customize and the width/height can't be too small (you need to set the width to at least 450 pixels). Also, you can't control the way the users will see the slideshow - the speed, the effects, etc.

However, if you wish to quickly create a slideshow of your favorites pictures, this might be a reasonable way to do it.